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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



AN ORATION 

By JOHN E. BURTON 
Of LAKE GENEVA, WIS. 



1 9 3 




* With other men it was literary achievement; 
liic uiumphs of war; the aggrandizement of conquest; the 
glory of new discovery, or the flight of imagination in the 
kingdom of Art or Song ; but with Lincoln it was character, 
CHASACTER, CHARACTER. This; is; whv his name grows 
with each succeeding year. 



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Copyright 1903, 

by 

JOHN E. BURTON, 





(Poriniit of Abraham Lincoln taken from an Original daguerreo- 
type, owned and in possession of John E. Burton, Lake Geneva, Wis., 1903.) 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



AN ORATION =■=— By John E. Burton 

OF LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN 



The character of Abraham Lincoln stands 
so high above all possible wrong doing that hon- 
esty was never mentioned or thought of as a 
virtue in him. 

He was not only the best product of pure 
American civilization which his century pro- 
duced, but he was, all in all, the best public man 
and sincerest statesman who has ever figured 
in the destiny of this nation or in the history of 
the world. 

To all right-minded Americans he is the ripe 
and rounded product of lohat every man toould 
like to be, and he will therefore remain, through 
all time, the symbol of perfected character. 
The whole world loves Lincoln because he did 
what the world knows, was right, and he avoided 
doing what the world knows to be wrong, and it 
is therefore doubtful if any human being will 
ever again hold a similar position of greatness 
in a similar and transcendent epoch, or ever 
fulfill the world's expectations so completely, as 
did Lincoln. 

His fame grows so steadily, so perfectl3\ so 



* The substance of this article was given in an address to the Post 
Graduate Chataufiua Circle in April. 189C. at the Ladies Seminary (Oak- 
wood) Building. Lake Geneva, Wis., in their Public Literary Entertainment 
and Lecture Course. 



naturall}^ and so mightily, and the very fiber 
of his character comes out so brilliantly as the 
searchlight of time reveals him from every pos- 
sible point of view that the fear among thought- 
ful men is, that, with the lapse of centuries, his 
fame ma}^ pass the boundary line allotted to 
llesh and blood and become obscured by enter- 
ing the realm of the mythical, where he may be 
lost to the world of struggling men among the 
gods and the myths which always inhabit the 
past. 

He was the child of Love before he was the 
child of Law. Born not only in poverty, but 
surrounded by want and suffering ; favored in 
nothing, wanting in everything- which makes up 
the joys of life, he trudged as a child the trail 
of sorrow, and was the playmate of Grief, and 
always above and around his mj^sterious young 
life there hung the shadow of a dark and mystic 
cloud. 

It was a literal truth that "he had not where 
to lay his head," and while he did not eat the 
"locust and wild honey," and while his raiment 
was not of "camel's hair," yet his clothing was, 
almost exclusively, "the skin of wild beasts," 
from his buckskin pants to the ponderous coon 
skin cap. A meaner or darker origin cannot 
well be imagined. Not one ray of genuine hope 
can be discovered to light his childhood. Nature 
seems to have bruised and hurt him so that in 
manhood he might gird himself to bind up the 
wounds of a bleeding nation. She seems to have 
handicapped and loaded his patient soul that he 
might justly hate the oppressors of men in his 
loftiest estate. She seems to have starved him 
that he might the better feel the hunger and the 
yearnings of a down-trodden race. His eyes 



were allowed to look at the sunlight through the 
greased paper windows of the primitive hut and 
log school-house that he might, in his conquering 
prime, appreciate the glor}^ of the noonday sun 
of Universal Freedom. Nature was his Mother, 
his Teacher, his Playmate, his All, and with a 
yearning that was never satiate he grew in stat- 
ure among the grand old trees of the forest, ever 
surrounded by bird song, flower and fern, and 
with unsandaled feet he walked the rough trail 
of the pioneer boy, straight through over rock 
and glen, to the mountain top of Perfect Sincer- 
ity, and as a man stood as natural as a child, yet 
possessed all the powers and knowledge of his 
sex and his race in their fullness and purity. 
Almost without playmates, he was the compan- 
ion of unadorned Nature, and with the intuition 
of the child of Nature^ his heart expanded to the 
influence of the flight of fowl, the basking fish, 
the habits of the timid deer, the ways of the wild 
turkey, and bounded with joy in the season of 
bloom of the wild crab and the sumac ; and rest- 
ing lazily in the Autumn and Indian Summer 
among the ripening nuts and the purpling grape, 
he studied with a joy, strange and profound, the 
wondrous movements of planet, moon and star. 
With a growth exceeding six feet and four inches 
he found himself almost like one awakening from 
a dream, a giant in stature with muscles of iron 
made memorable by felling the tree and splitting 
the rail for sturdy use. 

Thus he matured, like a prophet of old, and 
kept ever close to the great heart of Nature. 
As a matured man he could not sleep when the 
storm had blown the nest and the nestlings from 
the tree until he had restored them to the mother 
bird, and could not rest in the prime of his 



6 

iiicitehless manhood until a race of four millions 
of., fathers, mothers and children were restored 
to their natural i-ights after the thunderstorm 
of war had passed ; and if we do not anchor his 
mortal memor}' to the ocean bed of solid fact 
and history, I fear the day will j-et come when 
some wild hurst in the ruffled flow of human tur- 
moil will claim him as a Christ. Scarcely an 
attribute of the divine character is wanting in 
this unique man, who, in all the loneliness of 
his earl}' life, was unconsciously schooled, 
trained, perfected and graduated in all that was 
honest, natural, capable and kind. As a flat- 
boatman in the cit}^ of New Orleans he saw, for 
the first time, negro boys and girls and young 
women put up and sold as chattels upon the auc- 
tion block, and then and there the mordant sunk 
deep into his very soul, and he said to his com- 
panion, '''"Tliafs ivrong^ and if ever I get a chance 
to hit it^ by God,, Til hit it hard.'''' The "painted 
lizard" of human slavery had been photographed 
forever on his mind and memory and he bided 
his time with the patience of a God until the day 
should come and until the hour had struck when, 
with a single blow, he could make good that 
oath ; and so, later in life, we see Mm, amid the 
billows and blood of war, as he calmly says, 
"Wait and see the salvation of God." And so 
it is that the human race is waiting to see, as the 
years go by, the salvation of eternal right for- 
ever triumphant over wrong and made possible 
by his patience and- perfect hnnianity. 

His patience, however, did not weaken him 
or class him as quiescent, for when imposed 
upon and crowded toward insult or cowardice, 
or if his cause, when justl}' stated, was assailed 
by injustice or brutality the sleeping lion showed 



his fangs and his giant wrath seldom found any 
bully rash enough to stand in his way when he 
accepted challenge. His powerful exhibition 
when forced by taunt to twice throw the cham- 
pion Needham, at Wabash Point ; his righteous 
rage at New Salem when the leader of the bullies 
of Clary's Grove, Jack Armstrong, tried by foul 
means to get the advantage over him, and again 
when his excited men in the Black Hawk War 
attempted to kill the friendly Indian, defying 
practically the brawn and muscle of the whole 
regiment, all prove his practical manliness, if 
occasion demanded ; and such was his physical 
prowess that few men in all that Western coun- 
try ever wished to dispute his standing. 

The great dream of the centuries seems to 
have blossomed in his eventful life, and the 
more we learn of it the more we come to realize 
and to know that in him was the Perfect Man in 
the sane and soundest sense of the word, physi- 
cally, mentally and morally. Poverty made him 
good ; suffering made him great ; circumstances 
made him President ; fidelity made him beloved ; 
courage made him heroic, and Martyrdom made 
him Immortal. 

You may search the minutest records of 
recorded time and you cannot find another char- 
acter who made so few mistakes during the 
chaos of such trying ordeals, or who possessed 
on all great occasions that sublimity of faith and 
courage of action, as mark and make the charac- 
ter of Abraham Lincoln ; neither can you find 
another man who could control, and even guide 
to glory, all his impetuous subordinates in the 
heat of conflict and yet without offense compel 
them to unconscious obedience in the fulfillment 



of a destiny which he alone could read in the 
dusk of deathless performance. 

The record of this world does not show an- 
other character who was schooled in almost con- 
tinuous failure in youth and early manhood^ in 
order that he might the better serve as the 
successful and Great Commander in the most 
momentous epoch of human progress. 

Nowhere in the library of nations can you 
find another character so varied in all experi- 
ences and yet where every experience was 
clearly given for the perfect formation of a 
character unique and matchless. Look back over 
forty years and see a boy ever obedient, even 
where obedience was not especially commenda- 
ble, yet always obedient ; as a son, wise, thought- 
ful and obliging; as a pupil, almost a prodigy, 
and with a burning zeal for useful knowledge 
beyond all precedent ; as a boatman, capable of 
utilizing the rough experience of the Mississippi 
River ; as a soldier in the Black Hawk War, lit- 
tle better than a failure because his heart was 
too big to exercise the cruelties of Indian war- 
fare ; as a lover, sincere, poetic and ideal, almost 
to the border line of insanity; as a debater, 
candid, clear, original, truthful ; as a writer, 
fair, witty, useful ; as a candidate, weak but 
earnest and ever conscious of his superiority ; 
as an antagonist, formidable, real, full of sur- 
prises and dangerous ; as a victor, modest, gra- 
cious and benevolent ; as a man, possibly crafty, 
for a good purpose, but always natural, frank 
and winning, and always commanding and con- 
scious of his higher qualifications ; as a leader, 
slow, always preparing^ always aware of the grav- 
ity of the situation, action well timed and always 
sustained ; as a patriot, ambitious, but an ambi- 



tion that never crowded or even appi'oached the 
limit of his patriotism, therefore absolutely safe 
in all emergencies ; as a martyr, beautiful be- 
yond that of saint or scientist, and as a memory 
his was and is the dearest, the gentlest and the 
most Godlike. 

I have seen Abraham Lincoln and heard his 
voice. This is to me a happy recollection. 
From my childhood to this hour I have always 
kept every printed word which has fallen from 
his lips. It is the literary pride of my life that 
I have preserved with loving care all the books, 
works, biographies and printed souvenirs of 
this real man of men, until now I have passed 
the 1,000- volume line and still know that the 
future is growing with new works perenially. 
With other men it was literary achievement; 
the triumphs of war; the aggrandizement of 
conquest ; the glory of new discovery, or the 
flight of imagination in the kingdom of Art or 
Song ; but with Lincoln it was character, char- 
acter^ CHARACTER. This is why his name grows 
with each succeeding year. This is why our 
American schools, as well as the schools in for- 
eign lands, are making the 12th day of February 
a green spot in the dusty road of school routine, 
and are telling to the millions of boys and girls 
the story of a true patriot, a pure man, a char- 
acter beyond reproach, the safest model of 
citizenship, the Agamemnon of moral power 
throughout the world. 

It is the pride of millions of men and women 
to be able to say, " / have seen Abraham Lincoln 
and heard his voice.'''' Time will enhance the 
value of everything he ever touched and hallow 
his every word. No other character is known 
to the children of men who was more bashful or 



10 

tenderly sensitive or who more actually dreaded 
direct compliment. No man ever possessed a 
supremer contempt or indifference to unjust 
criticism or slander, and no man ever lived who 
was more conscious of his own actual worth and 
his ability to use that worth for the good of 
others. No man at his death was ever so uni- 
versally or so sincerely mourned as Lincoln. 
The world wept as a young child at its father's 
bier. His funeral train was fourteen hundred 
miles long, and his mourners moistened with 
sincerity's tears the soil of every civilized land ; 
while official history required 960 pages to print 
the plain record of telegram, resolution and sor- 
row of the Nations. 

He was not really an orator, as the world 
goes, yet his speech on the battlefield of Gettys- 
burg and his Second Inaugural Address are 
terse and treasured classics and rank with any 
sayings that Time has preserved from the lips or 
the pen of Cicero, Pericles, Philip or Phocian. 
No orator ever touched the tender chords which 
sweep the heartstrings in the soul of woman- 
hood more deftly than he, when he said, while 
pleading the case of the widow of the old soldier 
of 1812: "Time rolls on. The heroes of 1776 
have passed away and are encamped on the other 
shore. The old soldier has gone to his rest — crip- 
pled^ blinded and broken his widoio comes to me 
and to yom gentlemen of the jury, to right her 
wrongs- She was not always thus. She loas once 
beautiful as the morning. Her step tvas as light, 
her face as fair and her voice as sweet as ever 
rung in the lanes of old Virginia. Now she is 
poor, defenceless. Shall we, too, cast her offf'^ 
His courtroom was in tears. His suit was won. 

No man ever held woman in higher esteem 



11 

than Abraham Lincoln, and woman to-day is his 
loyal lover and defence, through ill and good 
report, and through her there shall be engrav- 
ened the ideal Lincoln in the minds of millions 
yet unborn. 

If all men could be like Lincoln there would 
be no need of Heaven. His pattern was formed 
in the Foundry of Fate, and when the world's 
greatest epoch had closed the mould was found 
to fit "the head of the corners." See his tall 
form sway under a sorrow almost infinite as he 
stands at the coffin of his dead benefactor, 
Bowlin Greene, and although a man of thirty- 
three his heart breaks with uncontrolled emotion 
as he tries to speak the words of gratitude and 
tender eulogy which he longed to express, but 
in the agony of his soul's despair he fails to 
make a sound, and, in a burst of overwhelming 
tears and groans, he leaves the scene. Never 
did a human heart offer to the dead a truer trib- 
ute. Language can never tell the depth of his 
feelings, and history will never record a wail 
more tender or a lay more sweet and divine. 

When the tender life of his first pure love 
went out and Ann Rutledge was laid in her 
grave, his was the pathetic voice which, in poig- 
nant grief, cried aloud as his vanishing reason 
all but left him : '"'' I cannot let the rains ^ the snotv 
and the storms heat upon her grave f^ A deeper 
anguish never pierced the heart of an honest 
man, since Christ wept in Gethsemane. 

Oh, what a legacy, what a heritage for us 
and ours and our heirs forever after us, and for 
the world, as Time the Saviour, reveals his 
growing worth. Oh, the great, broad, patient, 
courageous man, so calm in the tempest that 
radicals could not rush him and the Trumpet 



12 

of War could not intimidate him. His was the 
courage of the sublimest order ; absolutely per- 
fect in faith and that faith founded upon eternal 
justice and upon his perfect trust in a God of 
Justice, and in his own people and upon his own 
true and righteous self. You have but to put 
your ear to the welded rail of the past and the 
echoes of forty years will come back to you, 
and above the din and confusion of that awful 
period you will hear the clear, patriotic voice 
of a nation and that triumphant song, 

"TFe are coming, Father Abraham, 
Three hundred thousand more. ' ' 

This mighty surge of song is not the wail of 
despair nor the measured tone of defiance, but 
the belated and mighty response of thirty mil- 
lions of patriots sounding the cry which comes 
from the deep, welling passion of patriotism, 
echoing across plain and river, and over hill and 
mountain top, that a million defenders invinci- 
ble as an army with banners were coming in 
response to his righteous call to save from disso- 
lution and death the one nation which was and is, 
and is to be, the hope of the world. 

How strange it all seems to us now. The 
world will always see him, in the National storm 
of passion and the flow of fraternal blood, a inoj^al 
hero, and in the blast that blinded, he held the 
helm of State for four dark and terrible years, 
and until Fate had become fulfillment, and then 
in the Sunshine of Peace he appeared in the cap- 
ital of rebellion like a closing tableau, holding the 
trusting hand of his innocent boy while the fren- 
zied negro bows in almost idolatrous worship at 
his feet, and then he is suddenly lifted, as by 
some design of fatality, to the realm of earthly 
immortality. It verily seems as if Fate did play 



13 

with dates and events, for on the anniversary of 
the very day when the starry flag of Fort Sum- 
ter bowed to the bellowing guns of Beauregard 
four years before, Beecher and his compatriots 
restored it, in the harbor of Charleston, to the 
breeze of Heaven, and yet before its folds had 
fairly caught the joyous inspiration, and while 
darkness settled upon the land that night, his 
life went out by the hand of the assassin. 

No man is ever seen so tenderly as when 
humanity beholds him through the mellow vail 
of suffering and undeserved adversity. It is 
then we realize the force of the sentiment that 

"Chords that vibrate sweetest music 
Sound the deepest notes of woe." 

It can never be said that religious fanaticism 
aided him essentially in the completion of his 
world task ; neither that personal ambition ral- 
lied him to sudden success, and although success 
was his ruling motive, and was, all in all, and 
through it all, his guiding star, yet that success 
was founded upon the solid rock of truth, and 
through the darkness of that wildest and most 
tempestuous night of sorrow and suffering he 
stood, the central figure, looking over and above 
the heads of his contemporaries, like the giant 
he was, surveying the end and seeing the tri- 
umphant vision which was to mark the closing 
of the most remarkable conflict which ever sanc- 
tified the battle ground of nations. 

It is true that there have been other patri- 
ots in other lands than ours, and it is true that 
patriotism has lived as a principle in all the ages 
of the past, and that there has existed the calm 
of dignity and the consciousness of power all 



14 

through the centuries, but there has never' been 
but one Lincoln. 

Other men have been earnest and other men 
have been great, and even sincere, and what is 
still more, have been kind and useful to their 
fellow men and have helped to grace and crown 
the ages, and yet, / say^ there has never been hut 
one Lincoln. 

He did not believe in Christ, but he did be- 
lieve in a God of Justice, in a God that could not 
tolerate human slavery or injustice among his 
human kind. He had lived to learn and to know 
that his own judgment of men was reliable and 
right, and hence he gradually, but easily and 
certainly, overshadowed all his associates and 
contemporaries, and as a character stands alone 
from his rough-hewn cradle to his marbled tomb. 
In all that eventful journey he knew his own 
ability rightly and neither overestimated it nor 
underestimated it, and he dared to assume dan- 
gerous posts of duty, and yet never flinched or 
doubted. He was therefore greater than the 
greatest man of his time. LLe is the Agamemnon 
of IListory. 

No other man in history seems ever to have 
centered and focused universal interest in his 
every and minutest acts and personal character- 
istics like Lincoln. When standing he towered 
above his famous opponent, Douglass, fourteen 
inches, but when both were seated side by side 
he was but four inches higher, so exceptional 
were his legs and arms in length compared with 
his body. 

In the Illinois Legislature he belonged to 
the famous "Long Nine," the name applied to 
the nine members from his section, of which he 
was the tallest, and was called the "Sangamon 



15 

Chief," their combined height being fifty-five 
feet. To them and to him were due the success 
of changing the State Capital from Vandaha to 
Springfield, Sangamon Co., in 1837. 

It is remarkable how many men afterward 
famous were associated with Lincoln during his 
early or active life, including Peter Cartright, 
famous preacher, Col. Ellsworth, first to fall in 
war, Col. Baker, hero who fell at Ball's Bluff, 
Stephen A. Douglass, patriot and opponent. Sen- 
ator Lyman Trumbull, Governor Bissell, Gen- 
eral John A. McClernand, Judge David Davis, 
and others. 

He was born close to the famous Mason and 
Dixon's Line, about 39° 33' north latitude, mark- 
ing the line limit of slavery and hence naturally 
conservative as to Northern and Southern opin- 
ions. 

He was not wholly free from the local super- 
stitions of the Kentucky pioneer times, and the 
quick and living secrets of Nature, while real 
and understood, still carried a tinge of the mar- 
velous, for night winds, dark forests, swelling- 
streams, cries of wild beasts, sudden deaths, 
moaning trees, and avenging storms, sometimes 
suggest strange thoughts to the wisest minds. 

The well-timed hit on the lightning rod of 
the not over-consistent George Forquer, in his 
legislative canvass, recalls his clear and forceful 
side when his opponent assumed in public the 
air of a superior and prodded young Lincoln in 
his coarse dress of homespun clothes with lack 
of experience and ability, and Lincoln in 
thoughtful manner replied and, reviewing For- 
quer's follies and gullible nature as the prey of 
seductive agents, said that while he perhaps had 
many or most of the faults ascribed to him he 
was grateful that he ''''did not have to erect a 



16 

lujlhtning rod over his home to ivard off the ve)i- 
geance of an offended God''^ as Forquer had. 
As lightning rods were just then being intro- 
duced and were under ban with the majority of 
the Illinois people Forquer was silenced. 

The Shields incident, when Lincoln was 
forced as he thought to accept the challenge to 
fight a duel, after writing the anonymous letters 
as a widow from the "Lost Townships," shows 
his final faith and reliance in sound every day 
man sense. James Shields was State Auditor, 
and a rather excitable Irish gentleman from 
Tyrone, Ireland, and took mortal offense at the 
letters, as he imagined as a Democrat that they 
reflected upon his personal honesty in office, 
and no amount of persuasion by friends could 
satisfy him of Lincoln's intended good nature, 
and so the challenge was forced upon Lincoln, 
and having choice of weapons, he, on the same 
principle which in later years actuated John F. 
Potter in Congress with Pryor, chose cavalry 
broadswords. The day came and the parties 
met — Shields, a little, large-headed and firey 
man, and Lincoln of giant stature. At the final 
moment Shields gladly agreed to withdraw if 
his antagonist would assert that he only meant 
to make a political point as a Whig against 
a Democrat. Lincoln sensibly agreed. Asked 
later what he intended to do had they fought, he 
said, "7 should have used the advantage of my 
arms and legs and simplg split him from head to 
heeV 

It was nothing less than unique that upon 
his election to the Presidency he should appoint 
as his Cabinet and constant advisers the very 
men who were his opponents in the Republican 
National Convention for the nomination at Chi- 



17 

cago in 1860, and yet by that act he calmed and 
pacified all wounded aspirations, and though 
regarded as a dangerous move politically, it 
showed Lincoln's just and benevolent heart, his 
far-seeing judgment and his calm consciousness 
in his own ability to remain absolutely President 
and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy 
of the United States. 

The offense and as some felt the ungrateful 
if not disloyal conduct of his Secretary of the 
Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, in the treacherous 
storm and excitement of his second campaign in 
1864, when Chase publicly became a candidate 
against his chief, again showed how truly great 
Lincoln was, and his words on this occasion and 
his subsequent act in appointing Secretary Chase 
to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, proves him the towering polit- 
ical master and safe, unselfish patriot that he 
was. 

The intense honesty shown in his settling 
accounts with the Government when postmaster 
at New Salem, when he months afterwards pro- 
duced the exact amount to a dollar and a cent in 
the adjustment, and not only exact but identical 
coins received by him in the office, all laid away 
sacredly awaiting the official accounting, al- 
though he had been sorel}^ pressed in the mean- 
time for money. 

His stories have been retold, repeated and 
revamped until much falsehood has been mixed 
with originals, all of which were pointed and 
practical and always prepared and thought out 
for purpose and to convince forcibly. A Lincoln 
story usually carries its own evidence of truth 
and originality. Sometimes they carried not 
only conviction but were calculated to cut or 



18 

even humiliate if necessary. When his early 
antagonist at law, rather fresh and frothy, had 
talked at a rapid rate until he had tired court 
and jury, and for lack of facts sat down to the 
relief of all, Lincoln in his thoughtful way said : 
" Your honor has observed the misfortune of 
the opposing counsel, as it is clear that he can- 
not work his mind and his voice at the same 
time, for the instant his tongue starts it goes so 
fast that the mind ceases to act ; in fact he re- 
minds me of the first steam vessel which ap- 
peared on the Sangamon river. It was noted 
for its efforts to navigate with ease, but it had a 
five-foot whistle and only a three-foot boiler, and 
every time they blew the whistle the boat had 
to stop still." This carries the true Lincoln 
brand. 

The coarse jokes attributed to Lincoln never 
existed, and his intimates give testimony to that 
fact. In his associations with his Cabinet mem- 
bers he gave constant proof of his innate man- 
liness, and nothing pleased him more in business 
meetings or official work than for all to call him 
Lincoln. He disliked to be called Mr. President 
or Your Exellency, but felt relief to be called 
Lincoln, and always spoke to his Ministers as 
Bates, Stanton, Chase and Seward, though he 
never failed or missed seeing and appreciating 
the ludicrous and funny side to all things. 

He was a born reasoner, and when a mere 
boy, after borrowing the Crawford copy of 
Weem's Life of Washington, and having left it in 
the log crevice in his Indiana home where it got 
soaked by a shower during the night, he agreed 
to work three days pulling corn for the close- 
fisted Crawford to settle the account; he first 
asked if the three days' work was to pay for the 
damage done the hook ov for the hook itself-, and as 



19 

Crawford thought the book of no use, he said it 
woiild pay for the book, and so Lincoln became 
the owner of hin fivat actual booh, and it proved 
a good bargain too ; and many a reader to-day 
would gladly pay three hundred dollars for this 
same book could they secure it for posterity. 

His check for $5.00, made out while Presi- 
dent, payable to "The one-legged colored man or 
bearer," and which has been immortalized by 
the Lincoln History Society of New York City ; 
his letter to the little boy who met him on the 
street after he was nominated for President, 
spoke to him and shook hands with him, and who 
was taunted by his playmates in Springfield af- 
terwards for claiming Lincoln's acquaintance, 
until the great-hearted man wrote in answer to 
the boy's childish letter of appeal and stated 
over his signature while President of the United 
States, that he was glad to certify that he saw 
and remembered the boy and shook hands with 
him, and thus the boy became a hero. 

This same sincerity and frankness was ever 
his strength and safety, and served as faithfully 
in the dij^lomacy of Nations and as easily and 
verily changed the fate of the American Conti- 
nent, for while the trained and erudite Seward 
battled nervously with the ponderous and lugu- 
brious ambiguities of Lord Palmerston, Lincoln 
had written a plain letter in plain and touching 
language to Queen Victoria direct, and ap- 
pealed to her as a pure and noble woman to 
assure him in his trying ordeal against the sins 
of a century, that his efforts as a man threatened 
by rebellion yet seeking to maintain a friendly 
government and in opposition to the spread of 
human slavery, should not be injured and weight- 
ed by England's enmity. On a bright Sunday- 



20 

morning he received her more than Queenly 
answer by mail, saj'ing- she realized the burdens 
and dangers to his Government, and that slavery 
should not receive her aid or influence, and that 
the American Government under his guidance 
would never need to fear from her people while 
she was acknowledged Queen of England. He 
had won hy a mail's sense what diplomacy never 
secured^ and it was long afterwards that Seward 
learned this great historic fact. 

Lincoln's was the Faith that never faltered? 
and was built on truth and sense. 

Lincoln was pure in heart. He not only 
loved right but he was grand enough to do right. 
He hated wrong and he did no wrong. He for- 
gave to the last and loved forgiveness itself, and 
yet he needed little or none for himself. Hear 
his tender fatherly voice as he whispers to little 
"Blossom" the pardon for her erring brother. 
See him as he dictates that immortal dispatch 
saving the tired soldier and sleeping sentinel, 
Scott, from an unmerited death. Think of his 
transcendent attitude in his position of almost 
unlimited power, as his acts of forgiveness fret 
and chafe the impatient generals who clamor for 
discipline at the expense of life, as he says : 
Gentlemen-^ I cannot take the lives of these hoys 
toho love their country hut ivho have broken the 
rules of warfare in ohedience to the demands of 
exhausted nature. His mantle has fallen ujion 
no man. It is the heritage of America, the 
crown jewel of the world, and the hand of sacri- 
lege alone shall ever touch it. 

Let not the prude or the supercilious assume 
to blusli at his humble or even doubtful origin. 
Let them brush their dormant intelligence and 
remember who was William the Conqueror of 



21 

England, and who was Charles Martel or 
"Charles the Hammer," who saved Christian 
civilization to Europe and who drove back in the 
Vale of the Roncevalles the swelling tide of 
Moslemism in the decisive battle of Poitiers. 
Let them remember that Ahvahain Lincoln was 
a man and as a man was the greatest compliment 
that has ever been given or paid to the human 
race^ and likewise that he was never the cham- 
pion of the prude, the dude or the false ; and 
aristocracy has no power to either harm or 
heighten his glory now, and neither prudes, 
puppets nor apologizers have any place in the 
following of his mighty train. 

Lincoln could scarcely sing a note, but music 
was to his soul a thing divine, and Poetry and 
Song may lay their garlands upon his tomb with 
perfect confidence, for his character can absorb 
all their beauties and will glorify every author. 
His was the hand that wrote the request : 
"Please ask Philip Phillips to sing again to- 
night ''Your Mission^"" but do not say I said so." 

Abraham Lincoln is the man who gave his 
first biographer a kindly but knowing look when 
he found that he had stated that Lincoln had 
read Plutarch's Lives and had turned their 
sterling virtues to his own good account and 
character, who did not even correct the state- 
ment in the proof sheet ; but a week later, when 
that same proof sheet had been revised and 
was then ready for the printer, he with equal 
kindness and with a twinkling eye informed his 
biographer, Mr. John Locke Scripps, that in 
the meantime he had read Plutarch from cover 
to cover and had not skipped even a single word, 
and that now the biography was correct and true 
and might be printed. 



22 

Here is a man who, while he may have said 
boyish things, and even followed the rougher 
customs of rollicking youth in the sturdy land 
of the pioneer, yet in all the years of the prime 
of his manhood he was never known to say a fool- 
ish thing. A man who constantly believed in 
himself and believed that he was being fitted 
for a great purpose, and went on patiently and 
not unconsciously, preparing to accept the high- 
est post when the hour should strike. A man 
who was never surprised by the biggest events, 
the patient, sad, and yet ever rippling humorist 
who was great enough in the darkest hour to 
to turn the serious incident into sunshine and 
laughter, thus giving to his nature that natural 
and joyous vent from the dangers of growing 
and crushing responsibility. 

The man who never received or paid out an 
ill-earned or dishonest dollar in his whole life. 
The man who never had any use for either to- 
bacco, gambling, dissipation or liquor ; and with 
the gentle exception of poorly played billiards 
with a selected friend, on rare occasions, wasted 
no time upon idle pastime or artificial sports. 

The man to whom criticism and discourage- 
ments served only as friction the better to pro- 
pel the great engine of his mind as it tugged on 
the up grade of events. The man who stood 
self-poised while he saw and realized that the 
die was being cast and saw the molten metal of 
his own wondrous history poured into the mold 
of immortality. 

Surely Fate loved Lincoln, and in her long- 
ings she gave him the deathless kiss that he 
mififht never leave her. 

While others quaked with fear at the gath- 
ering storm, he grasped the helm with giant 



23 

grip as the great ship of state rcxle into the roar 
and crash of the huri'icane and held it firm and 
safe until the lightnings had ceased to play and 
until the vanishing clouds threw their lessening 
shadows over her deck, and until the big waves 
had done their worst, and until ripples only 
patted her storm-beaten sides and the great 
white harbor was once more in view with its 
sunsliine and its peace. Romance and miracle 
blend in the heavens as the sun bursts upon the 
scene, for as the last, long peal of thunder dies 
away in the distance, and the Rainbow of Peace 
appears, a sudden bolt from the clearing sky 
struck him dumb and dead on the deck, and the 
Great Loving Captain had gone to his reward in 
the flower of his faith and in the full strength of 
his giant manhood. 

It has been said that "God buries His work- 
men but carries on His work," and this great 
truth covers the life and martyrdom of Abra- 
ham Lincoln, the bravest, the most courageous, 
the most useful, the kindest, the tenderest, the 
sweetest memory that has thus far appeared^ in 
human form^ within the Vestibule of Time. 




Very truly yours, 




AUG 15 1903 



iPiiiii il«itl!ii|li«pii^^^ 



